Principal Core Infrastructure Software Engineer

** Job Description*
* The Principal Core Infrastructure Software Engineer is a Senior Staff-level, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining, building, and operating next-generation AI systems on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This person will set architecture and engineering direction for production-grade cloud distributed systems, agentic AI platforms, autonomous workflows, scalable inference infrastructure, and enterprise AI applications used in large-scale, business-critical environments.

This role requires a proven engineer who can translate ambiguous product and platform goals into durable technical strategy, lead multi-team execution without direct authority, and remain deeply hands-on in design, code, reviews, operations, and incident follow-up. The ideal candidate combines deep distributed systems experience with practical AI-native engineering, including orchestration of LLMs, tools, APIs, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and cloud services.

The expectation is to ship, scale, and operate reliable, secure, observable, and cost-aware AI platform systems while raising the technical bar for engineers across the organization.

** Responsibilities*
* Key Responsibilities include:

* Lead the development and implementation, and begin to architect, components of scalable distributed systems that support horizontal and vertical scaling to meet system demands, including leveraging distributed state management tools.

* Design, architect, and deliver scalable agentic AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool use, workflow execution, multi-step task orchestration, and safe human-in-the-loop escalation.

* Define scalability, performance, availability, and durability requirements for owned services and components.

* Build fault-tolerant systems that support redundancy, replication, automated failover, and in-service upgrades.

* Optimize services for high-throughput, low-latency, and large-scale cloud workloads.

* Design systems that handle network unreliability, service disruptions, and partition scenarios while meeting SLOs.

* Establish telemetry, KPIs, dashboards, and alerts to monitor service health, performance, reliability, and customer impact.

* Drive performance testing, load testing, fault injection, brownout testing, and other validation strategies to ensure correctness and resiliency.

* Implement secure infrastructure controls for multi-tenant cloud environments, including access controls, encryption, and remediation of security gaps.

* Develop automation, Infrastructure as Code, and deployment tooling to support safe patching, updates, rollbacks, and operational recovery.

* Take ownership of production operations, including troubleshooting, incident response, root cause analysis, and ongoing service improvements.

* Strengthen operational readiness by improving runbooks, monitoring, change management, deployment safety, and recovery processes.

* Collaborate with partner teams across OCI to align architecture, dependencies, and service requirements.

* Mentor engineers, review technical designs, guide implementation decisions, and help raise the engineering bar across the team.

Required Qualifications:

* Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

* 6-10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production systems; or equivalent experience demonstrating Senior Staff / Principal-level impact.

* Deep experience designing, building, and operating high-scale distributed systems, cloud services, infrastructure platforms, or AI/ML platform services.

* Strong programming skills in Java or Golang or Python and ability to contribute high-quality production code, reviews, tests, and debugging in complex distributed environments.

* Strong expertise with Kubernetes, Docker, cloud-native infrastructure, service-to-service communication, scalability, fault tolerance, observability, and performance analysis.

* Experience defining SLIs/SLOs, production readiness criteria, incident response practices, monitoring, tracing, experiments, and reliability programs…